Terrific script from Peter Yeldham. They refused to show it in Australia. Our equivalent of The Best Years of Our Lives. It showed on the BBC.
Susan Lever wrote an an excellent article on it - a link is here.
Premise
In Sydney, a group of wartime comrades gather for Anzac Day.
Cast
* Ray Barrett as Tim Anderson
* Alan Tilvern as Colin Bailey
* Jerold Wells as Greg Porter
* Ron Haddrick as Dave Rubin
* Nyree Dawn Porter as Judith Rubin
* Madge Ryan as Grace Hudson
* Ken Wayne as Jack Hudson
* Patricia Conolly as Val
* Ethel Gabriel as Mother
* Frank Leighton as Jerry Grant
* Barry Linehan as Gordon Shand
* Lyn Ashley as Kitty Porter
* Reg Lye as Carmody
Production
Yeldham was a leading TV writer at the time. He enjoyed TV plays saying "There are plays I want to write that can be written best in this medium. Television is best at exploring a character, or small groups of characters, at condensing incident into an hour or an afternoon, and I like to write this way. Television is not dependent upo n box office returns, or the whims of film financiers, and this is one of our freedoms. And besides, it’s quite a challenge, that man and his wife in their armchair. I’d like to write the kind of plays that make them take the telephone off the hook, and ignore any sleepless kids, and pretend they’re not home if friends ring the doorbell—just because they want to see the play through to the end."
Yeldham described in his introduction to the play that:
I wrote Reunion Day in the summer of 1961, in London. It took a month almost to the day. But for three years I had had this theme in my mind, an image of a group of men celebrating a time when they were younger, but the image was indistinct and twice I had abortive starts on the play that had to be abandoned. In one of these, I tried to tell the story through a young boy of eighteen, a son of one of the men killed during the war. This idea was submitted to Sydney Newman of ABC’s Armchair Theatre, and promptly turned down. The following year the BBC asked me for a play, and in desperation I searched for two pages of paper which should have been gathering dust in a drawer, and in which the theme of my play was written down. I couldn’t find them. And never have to this day.
Instead, I began again. My main theme was clear. As a boy in my native Sydney I remembered Anzac reunions, emotional, excited days when old soldiers gathered together and drank far into the night. Living in the past for one drunken day, for when they got together the past was all they had in common. But though this interested me, it was clearly insufficient. Their nostalgia to the past was obvious. Their reaction to the present was vital, if I was to make a play out of this subject.So they grew as characters. They stepped out of anonymous soldiers’ uniforms and became people: Jack Hudson who was a Sergeant, and who married a girl he slept with on victory night; Colin Bailey, who had been a ‘Casanova’ during the war and who these days lived on the stories of past conquests; David Rubin, Jewish and sensitive enough to see how far they have all grown away from their past comradeship; Tim Anderson, who at the age of 23 was a major, and ever since has been a failure . . . they and their friends and their wives became living people, who met and drank and faced the truth about what they had become during the afternoon and night of one celebration day.
Alan Tilvern was the only English actor.
Rehearsals started in December 1961 at the BBC's Manchester Studios. Three of the cast - Haddrick, Lye and Conolly - had performed in The One Day of the Year on stage.
It showed in January 1962.
My thoughts on the play
Peter Yeldham was one of the many Australian writers who emigrated to England in the 1950s to further his career, and he became one of the most successful, developing a strong reputation in the field of television. (He had learned his trade in radio and would later branch into films and theatre). He was approached for ideas and came up with Reunion Day, a tale of the Anzacs. (He developed it independently of The One Day of the Year). The play was put on the BBC with a mostly Australian cast, and received much acclaim. It was bought for broadcast on Channel Nine, but the censor of the day objected to its portrayl of veterans and it was pulled.Susan Lever did an excellent article on the play including reproducing the original script. It can be found here.
https://openjournals.library.sydney.edu.au/index.php/JASAL/article/view/9754
This play is fantastic. I would call it an Australian TV play masterpiece, our very own Best Years of Our Lives, and the fact it was essentially banned from being seeing here was a stunning misjudgement.
It wasn't exactly a surprise misjudgement, I should admit. Looking back, Australia at the time was notoriously insecure about its place in the world, and put an inordinate amount of pride in a few areas: the quality of our rural output, our sporting champions, and our war record. Reunion Day took on the latter, and the Powers That Be, couldn't handle it.
Not that Reunion Day trashed our war record exactly - no one was accused of war crimes, say - but the veterans depicted were not the wistful sunburnt warriors of legend, but people who were very, very human. They included men who were dissatisfied with life, casually anti-Semitic, reluctant to grow up, borderline alcoholic, keen on sex, cowardly in battle.
The One Day of the Year is the story of a family - specifically father and son; this has contributed to its on-going popularity as a stag play. Reunion Day is about a group of friends - a sort of Big Chill for Australian war veterans. There's Jack, going through a mid life crisis and unhappy with his marriage to Grace, who was a one night stand that stayed on; Tim was a war hero, a major at 23, who never got over that fact, and has never come close to accomplishing anything close to that since; Dave is Jewish, successful in business and happy in his marriage, who cracked up during the war; Greg was a poor soldier but now owns a pub; Col is a womaniser who sleeps with prostitutes.
Their problems are treated with empathy but clarity, and Yeldham kept surprising me: you think Tim asking Dave for a job will come at the end, but it's at the beginning, Dave gives it, then Tim continues to be a prick; Greg's daughter Kitty seems to be set up to be a victim of Col, but she thinks he's pathetic. These surprises are truer to character and strengthen the drama.
It's very adult - there's talk of one
night stands, we meet a prostitute, hear anti-Semitic cracks. Characters
admit to being horny, upset, lecherous, broke. It's a play by and about
adults.
It's a great pity this was never adapted into a stage play or a film. I wrote a biography of Rod Taylor and this is the sort of project that he would have been made for. It could have been a great for Bryan Brown or Russell Crowe or Jack Thompson or Grant Taylor or any one of the many splendid actors this country has produced. It's absolutely fantastic.
ABC Rejection
The ABC was offered the play but rejected it due to its similarities to The One Day of the Year.
Reception
The play was successful, particularly in Germany.
Australian Banning
The play was to have been shown on BTQ-7, TCN-9 in Sydney and HSV-7
in Melbourne. In January 1962 it was set for broadcast in April of that year.
However the censor refused to pass it. Chief censor C.J. Campbell told the TV Times the play "contained matter that was quite contrary to the Broadcasting Control Board's standards for television. The language used may be all right for a soldier's reunion but it is all wrong for a suburban sitting room."
Ron Haddrick said "there were only three 'bloodys' in the whole play. I was shocked and upset when I heard the play had been banned here."
Actor Ray Barrett wrote a letter to the Sydney Morning Herald saying he was "appalled and amazed that this play has been banned... It is a true and honest comment on men's difficulty to settle down after the war. This is not a play attacking the RSL or, in tact, the tradition of the reunion, but a play of life."
A spokesman for TCN-9 said:
Reunion Day depicts Anzac Day as just another excuse for a debauch. There is no remembrance of Gallipoli, or sacrifice. The action takes place almost entirely in a pub. The language goes from bad to worse. The characters have nothing in common. The conversation runs out every two or three minutes, and somebody says: 'Let's have a drink'. There is even a dose of anti-Semitism thrown in. The whole thing was blasphemous, obscene and thoroughly nasty. If we had shown it we would have had the RSL marching on us and not without justice. We would have appealed against the censor's ruling if we had thought the play was worth it. We didn't.
In 1966 Yeldham said "there's a local shyness about the RSL and attitudes to the Vietnam campaign. Not that it attacks the institution of Anzac Day. It is a study of old comrades who find they have carried memories beyond reality. But it is relevant to Australian life, and if anyone does produce it here, I'll donate the fee to the Australian Writer's Guild."This did not happen.
According to Filmink in the early days of Australian television "It took a genuine act of will to produce local stories for television and sometimes people were punished for doing so," giving responses to Reunion Day and The Multi-Coloured Umbrella as example.
Peter Yeldham later said in an interview with Susan Lever, who asked him about the historical mini series he wrote in the 70s and 80s... " I think it was all those years overseas when I couldn’t write many Australian things. I wrote a couple of Australian plays that were on British television but I never felt they belonged there. I mean they quite liked them but they didn’t think they were intrinsic there and one was going to be made here and that was Reunion Day which is about Anzac Day, but it was vetoed. It was scheduled and everything and it was going on Channel 9 and Frank Packer saw it and he vetoed it. He said it was … let me try and remember the words he used … anti-Semitic because one of my main characters in it was Jewish, it wasn’t anti-Semitic at all, but he said it was anti-Semitic, anti Christian and anti the RSL, so that was a fair old serve wasn’t it and so it never got on here, which was a shame really because it belonged here... I think some of the best television I did was in England and that really was transient because some of it was before they were using tape and recording it on tape and you’d meet someone on the street the next morning and they’d say I knew there was something I was meant to do last night, watch your play, gone, gone forever and that really was terrible. Today at least things are put on DVD or we’ve got tape and we can tape it, so they last a bit longer, but it is the most transient of all the mediums I think.
Q Do you think that’s a problem for people learning to be screenwriters that they don’t know what’s happened in the past?
A Yes, I think it is. I often think back to a lot of those plays in England, the Armchair Theatres and BBC plays, they’re not on any recordings anywhere. Some of them, I mean not necessarily mine, other people’s plays but wonderful plays and they’d be a revelation to some people now. I mean many of them would stand up against today’s work. And that’s a pity because there’s a whole 20 years, 15 years there of work that’ll never be seen again and even today I don’t think they record everything on DVD; it’s only the things that are popular, which are not always the things that are best.
"
Susan Lever
In her excellent piece on the play Lever said "Reunion Day is not so much a critique of attitudes to Anzac Day or misguided patriotism, as a chance to consider the new values of a thriving post-war Australia. His Anzac Day reunio n brings together a publican, a real estate manager, an insurance salesman, and other men engaged in unspecified business activities...
The most surprising element in the play may be the decision to make one of its central characters Jewish... The play is even-handed and sympathetic to its characters. The play, then, might be read as promoting a simple message about the need for masculine maturity in modern urban Australia. Like Lawler’s Summer of the Seventeenth Doll it rejects the dream of Australian mateship and masculine adventure for the more mundane life of the city.. Reunion Day is more interested in character observation, and the shifts in the relationships of the men meeting in the bar, than in a didactic message. It is a play with no melodramatic moments or extreme passions, exemplifying the qualities of television naturalism of its period.. . The play’s strengths lie in what Caughie insists is a particular television mode of naturalism—not an accident of the technology but a self-conscious form of art derived from the literary naturalism of the nineteenth century. This kind of realism works by ironic juxtapositions and understatement, rather than the deliberate argu ment about social justice we associate with social realism."
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| The Age 1 July 1966 p 9 |
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| AWW 20 July 1966 p 9 |
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| AWW 31 Jan 1962 p 15 |
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| Pictures from Susan Lever article |
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| AWW 31 Jan 1962 p 2 |
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| SMH 28 May 1962 p 2 |
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| SMH 14 Dec 1961 p 38 |
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| Belfast Telegraph 20 Jan 1962 p 3 |
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| The Stage 25 Jan 1962 p 11 | |
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| Qld TV Times 3May 1962 p 17 |
Forgotten Australian TV plays: Reunion Day
Today, I’m going to take a slight detour and discuss a TV play I haven’t actually seen. In my defence, there are no copies of the play to see (to my knowledge). However, there’s a script, it’s terrific, and it’s important. I’m talking about Reunion Day by Peter Yeldham.
Yeldham’s had one of the longest, most successful, yet relatively unheralded career of an Australian screenwriter. He hasn’t toiled in anonymity – the Women’s Weekly did a profile on him in the 1960s – but he has never garnered the profile of say, a David Williamson or Morris West, despite a CV of more than fifty years that includes radio plays, episodic TV, feature films, stage plays, miniseries, TV plays, short stories, novels, articles and a memoir.
I think this is partly due to his versatility (see: previous sentence, the), and partly due to the fact that so much of his work was done in England rather than Australia. I also feel that it’s because he once wrote a masterpiece about Australia and Australians that has never actually been seen here. This is Reunion Day.
Yeldham began his career in Australian radio in the 1940s, moving to Britain in the mid-1950s where, after a few rough years, he managed to establish himself in television. After a few more years, Yeldham began to write TV plays on Australian subjects, starting with Thunder on the Snowy and then Reunion Day. (Others included The Cabbage Hat Boys, East of Christmas and Stella, which was later turned into the feature film Boundaries of the Heart (1988)).
Yeldham later said he had the idea of writing a play about Anzac Day for about three years. He wrote in the introduction to Reunion Day that “As a boy in my native Sydney I remembered Anzac reunions, emotional, excited days when old soldiers gathered together and drank far into the night. Living in the past for one drunken day, for when they got together, the past was all they had in common.”
He tried to write up the idea twice, submitting one version to Armchair Theatre, an anthology series for ITV, who rejected it. Then the BBC asked Yeldham if he had any ideas, and he tried a third time. This time, Yeldham cracked it – the script took him a month and was broadcast on the BBC in 1962. The story was set in Australia but there were so many Australians in London at the time it was easy to find actors for the roles; they included Ray Barrett, Ron Haddrick, Reg Lye and Frank Leighton.
No copy of the broadcast exists, but academic Susan Lever wrote a superb article on the play which includes a complete script and an introduction by Yeldham.
Reunion Day has been completely overshadowed in cultural memory by another Anzac Day work that came out around the same time – Alan Seymour’s The One Day of the Year, which debuted on stage in 1960, played in London in 1961 and was filmed for Australian TV in 1962. While both works are set on Anzac Day, they are entirely different. The One Day of the Year is the story of a family in conflict – specifically father and son. Reunion Day is about a group of friends all roughly the same age having a, well, reunion – a sort of Big Chill for Australian war veterans.
There’s Jack (played by Ken Wayne), going through a mid-life crisis and unhappy with his marriage to Grace (Madge Ryan), which originated as a one night stand; there’s Tim (Ray Barrett), who was a war hero, a major at 23, but has never come close to matching that achievement since; Dave (Ron Haddrick) is Jewish, successful in business and happy in his marriage to Judith (Nyree Dawn Porter) but who cracked up during the war, a fact held over him by Tim; Greg (Jerold Wells) was a lousy soldier who is now a prosperous pub owner; Col (Alan Tilvern) is a womaniser who sleeps with prostitutes.
Their problems are treated with empathy and clarity, and Yeldham kept surprising me: you think (SPOILERS) Tim asking Dave for a job will come at the end of the story, but it happens at the beginning, Dave gives it, then Tim continues to be a prick; Greg’s daughter Kitty (Lyn Ashley, once married to Eric Idle) seems to be set up to be a victim of Col, but she thinks he’s pathetic. These surprises are truer to character and strengthen the drama.
It’s very adult – there’s talk of one night stands, we meet a prostitute and hear anti-Semitic cracks, characters admit to being horny, upset, lecherous, broke. It’s a play about middle-aged Australian men and their wives in all their messy, flawed glory.
Reception in Britain was strong, and the play was sold to West Germany. The production was bought by Frank Packer’s TCN-9 station for broadcast in Australia on Anzac Day 1962. (Sometimes Australian networks would buy scripts that had been performed overseas and produce their version locally, but TCN-9 picked up the British production.)
However, the censor refused to pass it. Chief censor C.J. Campbell told the TV Times that the play “contained matter that was quite contrary to the Broadcasting Control Board’s standards for television. The language used may be all right for a soldier’s reunion, but it is all wrong for a suburban sitting room.”
A spokesman for TCN-9 – which had bought the play, remember – said “Reunion Day depicts Anzac Day as just another excuse for a debauch. There is no remembrance of Gallipoli, or sacrifice. The action takes place almost entirely in a pub. The language goes from bad to worse. The characters have nothing in common. The conversation runs out every two or three minutes, and somebody says: ‘Let’s have a drink’. There is even a dose of anti-Semitism thrown in. The whole thing was blasphemous, obscene and thoroughly nasty. If we had shown it, we would have had the RSL marching on us and not without justice. We would have appealed against the censor’s ruling if we had thought the play was worth it. We didn’t.”
Actor Ray Barrett wrote a letter to the Sydney Morning Herald saying he was “appalled and amazed that this play has been banned… It is a true and honest comment on men’s difficulty to settle down after the war. This is not a play attacking the RSL or, in fact, the tradition of the reunion, but a play of life.”
But it did no good. The play was never seen in Australia – a state of affairs that continues to apply in 2021.
What got everyone so upset?
This play is fantastic. I would call it a masterpiece, our very own Best Years of Our Lives, and the fact that it was essentially banned from being seeing here was a stunning misjudgement.
Looking back, though, I do get why it was banned. I’m not saying they were right – they were dead wrong – but I get it.
The Australian society of 1961 – large sections of it, at least – was notoriously insecure about Australia’s place in the world, with an inordinate amount of pride being placed in a few areas: the quality of our rural output, sporting champions, and our war record. Reunion Day took on the latter, and the Powers That Be couldn’t handle it.
Not that Reunion Day trashed our war record – no one was accused of war crimes, say – but the veterans depicted were not the wistful sunburnt happy-go-lucky warriors of legend (see: Rafferty, Chips), but people who were flawed. They included men who were dissatisfied with life, casually anti-Semitic, reluctant to grow up, borderline alcoholic, keen on sex, cowardly in battle. In other words, human beings.
It’s a great pity that Reunion Day was never adapted into a stage play or a film. I wrote a biography of Rod Taylor (who starred in the 1966 spy comedy The Liquidator from a screenplay by Yeldham) and he would have been perfect for several of the lead roles. The same applies for Bryan Brown or Russell Crowe or Jack Thompson or Grant Taylor or any one of the many splendid actors this country has produced. It’s full of great parts.
In 1966, Yeldham, asked to address the controversy, said “there’s a local shyness about the RSL and attitudes to the Vietnam campaign. Not that it attacks the institution of Anzac Day. It is a study of old comrades who find they have carried memories beyond reality. But it is relevant to Australian life, and if anyone does produce it here, I’ll donate the fee to the Australian Writers’ Guild.”
This did not happen and still hasn’t happened. Instead of becoming acknowledged as the excellent piece of work it is, Reunion Day drifted off into obscurity until Susan Lever’s article gave it some much needed attention.
Yeldham moved past it. You have to overcome disappointment, to be a professional writer, even one as successful as he is. Reading his excellent memoir Beginning with an Empty Page I was struck just how many hurdles Yeldham had to overcome in his life: the early death of his mother, a totally unsympathetic father, a troubled relationship with his father’s new wife, a hostile cultural environment, financial challenges, marital hiccups (he was happily married for most of his life but his wife took off for a few months), family turmoil (his beloved brother David, a judge, committed suicide after being accused of pedophilia… just before a TV movie written by Peter Yeldham with a pedophilia subplot, Whipping Boy, was about to air), physical ailments, the general contempt for writers in the Australian film and TV industry, fights with directors and producers, widowhood.
But he plowed on, constantly adapting to not just survive but thrive, branching from radio (Address Unknown) to episodic TV (Emergency Ward 10, Shadow Squad), to TV plays (Thunder on the Snowy) to low budget features (The Comedy Man), to Harry Alan Towers films (Our Man in Marrakesh, Ten Little Indians), to blockbusters (The Liquidator, The Long Duel), to stage plays (Birds on the Wing, Fringe Benefits) to miniseries (1915, Captain James Cook, The Heroes), to Australian features (Age of Consent, Touch and Go), to novels (The Currency Lads, Dragons in the Forest).
(A personal aside: apart from Reunion Day, my own personal favourites of Yeldham’s output are Our Man in Marrakesh, a fun 1965 comedy thriller with Tony Randall imitating Cary Grant directed by fellow Aussie Don Sharp, and Heroes II, the 1992 miniseries that dramatised Operation Rimau).
As Yeldham writes in Beginning with an Empty Page, “with major disappointments… the only thing to do is pick yourself off the floor and write something else.” Yeldham’s career is a tribute to that.
Anyway, give Reunion Day a read. It deserves it.
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| TV Listener In 21-27 April 1962 |
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| NAA WC "V" |
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